What can I say about time series data that hasn't already been said? Quite a lot, it turns out. At Epinomy, our attention has been quite well focused on a particular kind of structured data known as "time series". Who knew these things were so ubiquitous?

We started out with the idea that you can apply search techniques like those used by Amazon.com and Google to find any old structured data. By structured data, I mean tables and relational databases as opposed to unstructured data like documents, e-mails, tweets and other textual data sources.

As part of our development efforts, it became clear that there is a particular kind of data set that is in use by just about every large organization on the planet. Time series are everywhere. The operational data of any organization has a time dimension associated with it, and that's what a time series is: a list of measurements of some quantity that changes over time.

Just off the top of my head, here are a half dozen verticals and some of the time series that they track:

Financial Services

Stock Prices

Interest Rates

Exchange Rates

Pharmaceuticals

Pharmacokinetics

Adverse Events

Dosing

Sales

Production

etail

Clickstreams

Sales

Purchases

Margin

Manufacturing

Units Produced

Defects

Units Shipped

Net Margin

Health Care

Patient Vital Signs

Patient Billing History

Interventions

Government

Contractor Hours

Epidemiology

Logistics

Demographics

Law Enforcement

That's literally 3 minutes of thinking - there are hundreds more applications for time series search.

I'm a Florida boy. I moved here in 1971 and grew up in Pinellas Park. And while I was inoculated in infancy by Milwaukee winters, I barely know anything about driving in snow.

When my brother, who lives in Colorado, pinged me with this dire and breathless admonition: "I highly recommend you get snow tires.", I was inclined to pay some attention.

I don't know from snow tires. I don't know the etiquette. I don't know the science, the practice nor the art of changing tires twice a year.

Since I'm having my pre-trip check-up and maintenance yesterday, I did some research to see if I needed to plunk down a few hundred bucks on tires I would only use once. I hit the forums, my brother hit the Youtube and we reported back with our results.

1) the weather forecast for the next 10 days looks clear. No guarantee, of course.

2) This:

It looks like this guy does have snow tires. But I'm going to take a chance. Most of the forums I read say that the all-season 19" Goodyear tires on my Model S are perfectly fine for snow.

I planned a few more details about the trip. It was not as trivial as I had thought it would be to map out the complete supercharger route. While the Tesla site shows the address of all the open superchargers, Google Maps search is not up-to-date enough to find them all by the keyword "Tesla Supercharger".

So, I manually and painstakingly created a 40 (the maximum) waypoints on Roadtripper, one for each Supercharger on my route.